The Mountains
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Stewart Edward White >> The Mountains
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We stood on the brink of a wide smooth velvet-
creased range that dipped down and down to miniature
canons far below. Not a single little boulder
broke the rounded uniformity of the wild grasses.
Out from beneath us crept the plain, sluggish and
inert with heat.
Threads of trails, dull white patches of alkali, vague
brown areas of brush, showed indeterminate for a little
distance. But only for a little distance. Almost
at once they grew dim, faded in the thickness of
atmosphere, lost themselves in the mantle of heat that lay
palpable and brown like a shimmering changing veil,
hiding the distance in mystery and in dread. It was
a land apart; a land to be looked on curiously from
the vantage-ground of safety,--as we were looking
on it from the shoulder of the mountain,--and then
to be turned away from, to be left waiting behind
its brown veil for what might come. To abandon
the high country, deliberately to cut loose from the
known, deliberately to seek the presence that lay
in wait,--all at once it seemed the height of
grotesque perversity. We wanted to turn on our heels.
We wanted to get back to our hills and fresh breezes
and clear water, to our beloved cheerful quail, to our
trails and the sweet upper air.
For perhaps a quarter of an hour we sat our horses,
gazing down. Some unknown disturbance lazily
rifted the brown veil by ever so little. We saw, lying
inert and languid, obscured by its own rank steam, a
great round lake. We knew the water to be bitter,
poisonous. The veil drew together again. Wes shook
himself and sighed, "There she is,--damn her!" said he.
VI
THE INFERNO
For eight days we did penance, checking off the
hours, meeting doggedly one after another the
disagreeable things. We were bathed in heat; we
inhaled it; it soaked into us until we seemed to radiate
it like so many furnaces. A condition of thirst
became the normal condition, to be only slightly
mitigated by a few mouthfuls from zinc canteens of
tepid water. Food had no attractions: even smoking
did not taste good. Always the flat country stretched
out before us. We could see far ahead a landmark
which we would reach only by a morning's travel.
Nothing intervened between us and it. After we
had looked at it a while, we became possessed of an
almost insane necessity to make a run for it. The
slow maddening three miles an hour of the pack-
train drove us frantic. There were times when it
seemed that unless we shifted our gait, unless we
stepped outside the slow strain of patience to which
the Inferno held us relentlessly, we should lose our
minds and run round and round in circles--as people
often do, in the desert.
And when the last and most formidable hundred
yards had slunk sullenly behind us to insignificance,
and we had dared let our minds relax from the
insistent need of self-control--then, beyond the cotton.
woods, or creek-bed, or group of buildings, whichever
it might be, we made out another, remote as
paradise, to which we must gain by sunset. So again
the wagon-trail, with its white choking dust, its
staggering sun, its miles made up of monotonous inches,
each clutching for a man's sanity.
We sang everything we knew; we told stories;
we rode cross-saddle, sidewise, erect, slouching; we
walked and led our horses; we shook the powder of
years from old worn jokes, conundrums, and puzzles,
--and at the end, in spite of our best efforts, we fell
to morose silence and the red-eyed vindictive
contemplation of the objective point that would not
seem to come nearer.
For now we lost accurate sense of time. At first it
had been merely a question of going in at one side
of eight days, pressing through them, and coming out
on the other side. Then the eight days would be
behind us. But once we had entered that enchanted
period, we found ourselves more deeply involved.
The seemingly limited area spread with startling
swiftness to the very horizon. Abruptly it was borne
in on us that this was never going to end; just as
now for the first time we realized that it had begun
infinite ages ago. We were caught in the entanglement
of days. The Coast Ranges were the experiences
of a past incarnation: the Mountains were a myth.
Nothing was real but this; and this would endure
forever. We plodded on because somehow it was
part of the great plan that we should do so. Not
that it did any good:--we had long since given up
such ideas. The illusion was very real; perhaps it
was the anodyne mercifully administered to those
who pass through the Inferno.
Most of the time we got on well enough. One
day, only, the Desert showed her power. That day,
at five of the afternoon, it was one hundred and
twenty degrees in the shade. And we, through necessity
of reaching the next water, journeyed over the
alkali at noon. Then the Desert came close on us and
looked us fair in the eyes, concealing nothing. She
killed poor Deuce, the beautiful setter who had traveled
the wild countries so long; she struck Wes
and the Tenderfoot from their horses when finally
they had reached a long-legged water tank; she even
staggered the horses themselves. And I, lying under
a bush where I had stayed after the others in the hope
of succoring Deuce, began idly shooting at ghostly
jack-rabbits that looked real, but through which the
revolver bullets passed without resistance.
After this day the Tenderfoot went water-crazy.
Watering the horses became almost a mania with
him. He could not bear to pass even a mud-hole
without offering the astonished Tunemah a chance to fill
up, even though that animal had drunk freely not twenty
rods back. As for himself, he embraced every opportunity;
and journeyed draped in many canteens.
After that it was not so bad. The thermometer
stood from a hundred to a hundred and five or six,
to be sure, but we were getting used to it. Discomfort,
ordinary physical discomfort, we came to accept
as the normal environment of man. It is astonishing
how soon uniformly uncomfortable conditions, by
very lack of contrast, do lose their power to color
the habit of mind. I imagine merely physical
unhappiness is a matter more of contrasts than of actual
circumstances. We swallowed dust; we humped
our shoulders philosophically under the beating of
the sun, we breathed the debris of high winds; we
cooked anyhow, ate anything, spent long idle fly-
infested hours waiting for the noon to pass; we slept
in horse-corrals, in the trail, in the dust, behind
stables, in hay, anywhere. There was little water,
less wood for the cooking.
It is now all confused, an impression of events with
out sequence, a mass of little prominent purposeless
things like rock conglomerate. I remember leaning
my elbows on a low window-ledge and watching a
poker game going on in the room of a dive. The
light came from a sickly suspended lamp. It fell
on five players,--two miners in their shirt-sleeves, a
Mexican, a tough youth with side-tilted derby hat,
and a fat gorgeously dressed Chinaman. The men
held their cards close to their bodies, and wagered in
silence. Slowly and regularly the great drops of sweat
gathered on their faces. As regularly they raised the
backs of their hands to wipe them away. Only the
Chinaman, broad-faced, calm, impassive as Buddha,
save for a little crafty smile in one corner of his eye,
seemed utterly unaffected by the heat, cool as autumn.
His loose sleeve fell back from his forearm when he
moved his hand forward, laying his bets. A jade
bracelet slipped back and forth as smoothly as on
yellow ivory.
Or again, one night when the plain was like a sea
of liquid black, and the sky blazed with stars, we
rode by a sheep-herder's camp. The flicker of a fire
threw a glow out into the dark. A tall wagon, a
group of silhouetted men, three or four squatting
dogs, were squarely within the circle of illumination.
And outside, in the penumbra of shifting half light,
now showing clearly, now fading into darkness, were
the sheep, indeterminate in bulk, melting away by
mysterious thousands into the mass of night. We
passed them. They looked up, squinting their eyes
against the dazzle of their fire. The night closed
about us again.
Or still another: in the glare of broad noon, after
a hot and trying day, a little inn kept by a French
couple. And there, in the very middle of the Inferno,
was served to us on clean scrubbed tables, a meal
such as one gets in rural France, all complete, with
the potage, the fish fried in oil, the wonderful ragout,
the chicken and salad, the cheese and the black coffee,
even the vin ordinaire. I have forgotten the name
of the place, its location on the map, the name of its
people,--one has little to do with detail in the
Inferno,--but that dinner never will I forget, any
more than the Tenderfoot will forget his first sight
of water the day when the Desert "held us up."
Once the brown veil lifted to the eastward. We,
souls struggling, saw great mountains and the whiteness
of eternal snow. That noon we crossed a river,
hurrying down through the flat plain, and in its
current came the body of a drowned bear-cub, an alien
from the high country.
These things should have been as signs to our
jaded spirits that we were nearly at the end of our
penance, but discipline had seared over our souls, and
we rode on unknowing.
Then we came on a real indication. It did not
amount to much. Merely a dry river-bed; but the
farther bank, instead of being flat, cut into a low swell
of land. We skirted it. Another swell of land, like
the sullen after-heave of a storm, lay in our way.
Then we crossed a ravine. It was not much of a
ravine; in fact it was more like a slight gouge in the
flatness of the country. After that we began to see
oak-trees, scattered at rare intervals. So interested
were we in them that we did not notice rocks beginning
to outcrop through the soil until they had
become numerous enough to be a feature of the
landscape. The hills, gently, quietly, without abrupt
transition, almost as though they feared to awaken
our alarm by too abrupt movement of growth, glided
from little swells to bigger swells. The oaks gathered
closer together. The ravine's brother could almost be
called a canon. The character of the country had
entirely changed.
And yet, so gradually had this change come about
that we did not awaken to a full realization of our
escape. To us it was still the plain, a trifle modified
by local peculiarity, but presently to resume its
wonted aspect. We plodded on dully, anodyned
with the desert patience.
But at a little before noon, as we rounded the cheek
of a slope, we encountered an errant current of air.
It came up to us curiously, touched us each in turn,
and went on. The warm furnace heat drew in on us
again. But it had been a cool little current of air, with
something of the sweetness of pines and water and
snow-banks in it. The Tenderfoot suddenly reined
in his horse and looked about him.
"Boys!" he cried, a new ring of joy in his voice,
"we're in the foot-hills!"
Wes calculated rapidly. "It's the eighth day
to-day: I guessed right on the time."
We stretched our arms and looked about us. They
were dry brown hills enough; but they were hills, and
they had trees on them, and canons in them, so to our
eyes, wearied with flatness, they seemed wonderful.
VII
THE FOOT-HILLS
At once our spirits rose. We straightened in our
saddles, we breathed deep, we joked. The
country was scorched and sterile; the wagon-trail,
almost paralleling the mountains themselves on a long
easy slant toward the high country, was ankle-deep
in dust; the ravines were still dry of water. But it
was not the Inferno, and that one fact sufficed. After
a while we crossed high above a river which dashed
white water against black rocks, and so were happy.
The country went on changing. The change was
always imperceptible, as is growth, or the stealthy
advance of autumn through the woods. From moment
to moment one could detect no alteration. Something
intangible was taken away; something impalpable added.
At the end of an hour we were in the oaks and sycamores;
at the end of two we were in the pines and low
mountains of Bret Harte's Forty-Nine.
The wagon-trail felt ever farther and farther into
the hills. It had not been used as a stage-route for
years, but the freighting kept it deep with dust, that
writhed and twisted and crawled lazily knee-high to
our horses, like a living creature. We felt the swing
and sweep of the route. The boldness of its stretches,
the freedom of its reaches for the opposite slope, the
wide curve of its horseshoes, all filled us with the
breath of an expansion which as yet the broad low
country only suggested.
Everything here was reminiscent of long ago. The
very names hinted stories of the Argonauts. Coarse
Gold Gulch, Whiskey Creek, Grub Gulch, Fine
Gold Post-Office in turn we passed. Occasionally,
with a fine round dash into the open, the trail drew
one side to a stage-station. The huge stables, the
wide corrals, the low living-houses, each shut in its
dooryard of blazing riotous flowers, were all familiar.
Only lacked the old-fashioned Concord coach, from
which to descend Jack Hamlin or Judge Starbottle.
As for M'liss, she was there, sunbonnet and all.
Down in the gulch bottoms were the old placer
diggings. Elaborate little ditches for the deflection
of water, long cradles for the separation of gold,
decayed rockers, and shining in the sun the tons and
tons of pay dirt which had been turned over pound
by pound in the concentrating of its treasure. Some
of the old cabins still stood. It was all deserted now,
save for the few who kept trail for the freighters, or
who tilled the restricted bottom-lands of the flats.
Road-runners racked away down the paths; squirrels
scurried over worn-out placers; jays screamed and
chattered in and out of the abandoned cabins. Strange
and shy little creatures and birds, reassured by the
silence of many years, had ventured to take to
themselves the engines of man's industry. And the warm
California sun embalmed it all in a peaceful forgetfulness.
Now the trees grew bigger, and the hills more
impressive. We should call them mountains in the East.
Pines covered them to the top, straight slender pines
with voices. The little flats were planted with great
oaks. When we rode through them, they shut out
the hills, so that we might have imagined ourselves
in the level wooded country. There insisted the effect
of limitless tree-grown plains, which the warm drowsy
sun, the park-like landscape, corroborated. And yet
the contrast of the clear atmosphere and the sharp air
equally insisted on the mountains. It was a strange
and delicious double effect, a contradiction of natural
impressions, a negation of our right to generalize from
previous experience.
Always the trail wound up and up. Never was it
steep; never did it command an outlook. Yet we
felt that at last we were rising, were leaving the level
of the Inferno, were nearing the threshold of the high
country.
Mountain peoples came to the edges of their clearings
and gazed at us, responding solemnly to our
salutations. They dwelt in cabins and held to
agriculture and the herding of the wild mountain cattle.
From them we heard of the high country to which
we were bound. They spoke of it as you or I
would speak of interior Africa, as something inconceivably
remote, to be visited only by the adventurous,
an uninhabited realm of vast magnitude and
unknown dangers. In the same way they spoke of
the plains. Only the narrow pine-clad strip between
the two and six thousand feet of elevation they felt
to be their natural environment. In it they found the
proper conditions for their existence. Out of it those
conditions lacked. They were as much a localized
product as are certain plants which occur only at
certain altitudes. Also were they densely ignorant of
trails and routes outside of their own little districts.
All this, you will understand, was in what is known
as the low country. The landscape was still brown;
the streams but trickles; sage-brush clung to the
ravines; the valley quail whistled on the side hills.
But one day we came suddenly into the big pines and
rocks; and that very night we made our first camp in a
meadow typical of the mountains we had dreamed about.
THE PINES
VIII
THE PINES
I do not know exactly how to make you feel the charm
of that first camp in the big country. Certainly I can
never quite repeat it in my own experience.
Remember that for two months we had grown
accustomed to the brown of the California landscape,
and that for over a week we had traveled in the
Inferno. We had forgotten the look of green grass,
of abundant water; almost had we forgotten the taste
of cool air. So invariably had the trails been dusty,
and the camping-places hard and exposed, that we
had come subconsciously to think of such as typical
of the country. Try to put yourself in the frame of
mind those conditions would make.
Then imagine yourself climbing in an hour or
so up into a high ridge country of broad cup-like
sweeps and bold outcropping ledges. Imagine a forest
of pine-trees bigger than any pines you ever saw
before,--pines eight and ten feet through, so huge
that you can hardly look over one of their prostrate
trunks even from the back of your pony. Imagine,
further, singing little streams of ice-cold water, deep
refreshing shadows, a soft carpet of pine-needles
through which the faint furrow of the trail runs as
over velvet. And then, last of all, in a wide opening,
clear as though chopped and plowed by some back-
woodsman, a park of grass, fresh grass, green as a
precious stone.
This was our first sight of the mountain meadows.
From time to time we found others, sometimes a half
dozen in a day. The rough country came down close
about them, edging to the very hair-line of the magic
circle, which seemed to assure their placid sunny
peace. An upheaval of splintered granite often tossed
and tumbled in the abandon of an unrestrained passion
that seemed irresistibly to overwhelm the sanities
of a whole region; but somewhere, in the very forefront
of turmoil, was like to slumber one of these little
meadows, as unconscious of anything but its own
flawless green simplicity as a child asleep in mid-ocean.
Or, away up in the snows, warmed by the fortuity of
reflected heat, its emerald eye looked bravely out to
the heavens. Or, as here, it rested confidingly in the
very heart of the austere forest.
Always these parks are green; always are they clear
and open. Their size varies widely. Some are as
little as a city lawn; others, like the great Monache,[2]
are miles in extent. In them resides the possibility
of your traveling the high country; for they supply
the feed for your horses.
[2] Do not fail to sound the final e.
Being desert-weary, the Tenderfoot and I cried out
with the joy of it, and told in extravagant language
how this was the best camp we had ever made.
"It's a bum camp," growled Wes. "If we couldn't
get better camps than this, I'd quit the game."
He expatiated on the fact that this particular
meadow was somewhat boggy; that the feed was too
watery; that there'd be a cold wind down through
the pines; and other small and minor details. But
we, our backs propped against appropriately slanted
rocks, our pipes well aglow, gazed down the twilight
through the wonderful great columns of the trees to
where the white horses shone like snow against the
unaccustomed relief of green, and laughed him to
scorn. What did we--or the horses for that matter
--care for trifling discomforts of the body? In these
intangible comforts of the eye was a great refreshment
of the spirit.
The following day we rode through the pine
forests growing on the ridges and hills and in the
elevated bowl-like hollows. These were not the so-
called "big trees,"--with those we had to do later,
as you shall see. They were merely sugar and yellow
pines, but never anywhere have I seen finer specimens.
They were planted with a grand sumptuousness
of space, and their trunks were from five to
twelve feet in diameter and upwards of two hundred
feet high to the topmost spear. Underbrush, ground
growth, even saplings of the same species lacked
entirely, so that we proceeded in the clear open aisles
of a tremendous and spacious magnificence.
This very lack of the smaller and usual growths,
the generous plan of spacing, and the size of the trees
themselves necessarily deprived us of a standard
of comparison. At first the forest seemed immense.
But after a little our eyes became accustomed to its
proportions. We referred it back to the measures of
long experience. The trees, the wood-aisles, the
extent of vision shrunk to the normal proportions of an
Eastern pinery. And then we would lower our gaze.
The pack-train would come into view. It had become
lilliputian, the horses small as white mice, the men
like tin soldiers, as though we had undergone an
enchantment. But in a moment, with the rush of a mighty
transformation, the great trees would tower huge again.
In the pine woods of the mountains grows also a
certain close-clipped parasitic moss. In color it is
a brilliant yellow-green, more yellow than green. In
shape it is crinkly and curly and tangled up with
itself like very fine shavings. In consistency it is dry
and brittle. This moss girdles the trunks of trees
with innumerable parallel inch-wide bands a foot or
so apart, in the manner of old-fashioned striped
stockings. It covers entirely sundry twigless branches.
Always in appearance is it fantastic, decorative,
almost Japanese, as though consciously laid in with its
vivid yellow-green as an intentional note of a tone
scheme. The somberest shadows, the most neutral
twilights, the most austere recesses are lighted by it
as though so many freakish sunbeams had severed
relations with the parent luminary to rest quietly in
the coolnesses of the ancient forest.
Underfoot the pine-needles were springy beneath
the horse's hoof. The trail went softly, with the
courtesy of great gentleness. Occasionally we caught sight
of other ridges,--also with pines,--across deep
sloping valleys, pine filled. The effect of the distant
trees seen from above was that of roughened velvet,
here smooth and shining, there dark with rich
shadows. On these slopes played the wind. In the
level countries it sang through the forest progressively:
here on the slope it struck a thousand trees at
once. The air was ennobled with the great voice, as
a church is ennobled by the tones of a great organ.
Then we would drop back again to the inner country,
for our way did not contemplate the descents nor
climbs, but held to the general level of a plateau.
Clear fresh brooks ran in every ravine. Their water
was snow-white against the black rocks; or lay dark
in bank-shadowed pools. As our horses splashed
across we could glimpse the rainbow trout flashing
to cover. Where the watered hollows grew lush were
thickets full of birds, outposts of the aggressively
and cheerfully worldly in this pine-land of spiritual
detachment. Gorgeous bush-flowers, great of petal
as magnolias, with perfume that lay on the air like
a heavy drowsiness; long clear stretches of an ankle-
high shrub of vivid emerald, looking in the distance
like sloping meadows of a peculiar color-brilliance;
patches of smaller flowers where for the trifling space
of a street's width the sun had unobstructed fall,--
these from time to time diversified the way, brought
to our perceptions the endearing trifles of earthiness,
of humanity, befittingly to modify the austerity of
the great forest. At a brookside we saw, still fresh
and moist, the print of a bear's foot. From a patch
of the little emerald brush, a barren doe rose to
her feet, eyed us a moment, and then bounded away
as though propelled by springs. We saw her from
time to time surmounting little elevations farther and
farther away.
The air was like cold water. We had not lung
capacity to satisfy our desire for it. There came with
it a dry exhilaration that brought high spirits, an
optimistic viewpoint, and a tremendous keen appetite.
It seemed that we could never tire. In fact we never
did. Sometimes, after a particularly hard day, we
felt like resting; but it was always after the day's
work was done, never while it was under way. The
Tenderfoot and I one day went afoot twenty-two
miles up and down a mountain fourteen thousand
feet high. The last three thousand feet were nearly
straight up and down. We finished at a four-mile
clip an hour before sunset, and discussed what to
do next to fill in the time. When we sat down, we
found we had had about enough; but we had not
discovered it before.
All of us, even the morose and cynical Dinkey, felt
the benefit of the change from the lower country.
Here we were definitely in the Mountains. Our
plateau ran from six to eight thousand feet in
altitude. Beyond it occasionally we could see three more
ridges, rising and falling, each higher than the last.
And then, in the blue distance, the very crest of the
broad system called the Sierras,--another wide region
of sheer granite rising in peaks, pinnacles, and minarets,
rugged, wonderful, capped with the eternal snows.
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